


A Thin Line

by agentverbivore (verbivore8642)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, Adorable FitzSimmons, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, First Kiss, FitzSimmons Secret Santa, Fluff, Jemma's POV, Making Out, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Spans 3 years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbivore8642/pseuds/agentverbivore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons is a sixteen year old girl with one PhD and a million questions, so the last thing she could possibly be interested in is finding her soulmate - but then the marks appear on her and her grouchy, uncommunicative lab partner’s arms. </p><p>Considering the fact that he hates her, this really isn’t what she thought she'd learn in chemistry lab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thin Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [princessmelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessmelia/gifts).



> Written for princessmelia's FitzSimmons Secret Santa prompt, which was: "Interesting Soulmates AU." I used [this post](http://thegeminisage.tumblr.com/post/94680598838) to come up with the specific idea.
> 
> I hope this is what you wanted, dear - happy holidays! 
> 
> Thank you as always to MK, who edited - and okayed my version of this trope.

Jemma Simmons was sixteen years old, too smart for her own good, and bored witless waiting for the results of her chemistry experiment. She couldn’t leave the lab until the project was complete but remaining here was stultifying, mostly because her lab partner seemed to loathe her very existence and that meant that he was useless for providing her any kind of amusement or mental stimulation.

Which is not to say that he was stupid. In fact, Leopold Fitz was the only other person at SHIELD Academy who equaled Jemma in brilliance and therefore theoretically should have been the optimal person to provide her with intellectual entertainment. It didn't hurt that they were both the youngest students here, years below the others in age and both far outranking them in brainpower. But, also like Jemma, Fitz was incredibly competitive, and he seemed to have taken her intelligence as a challenge to his own, only acknowledging her to disagree when he was called upon in class. As a result, they’d barely spoken since being introduced in a group at international student orientation. Until, that is, they were partnered in chemistry lab two weeks ago, during which they’d only spoken when it was necessary. And, in today's case, waiting for an experiment to work itself out did not require conversation. 

Crossing her arms as she leaned back in her desk chair, Jemma observed him while he tinkered with a robotics part a few short feet from her. His hands moved constantly, seemingly using the object like a rubrics cube, rapidly disassembling and reassembling it as if to focus a train of thought. It really was a pity he hated her and that she desperately wanted to be the absolute top of the class (and therefore needed to beat him), because they worked very well together. When they weren’t sitting in cold silence, anyway. 

As Fitz leaned over to reach for his uncapped thermos, the timer on their computer monitor rang, and Jemma leapt up, thanking everything that was holy that she’d be able to leave soon. She stretched out her arm to key in the command to bring up the results just as Fitz attempted to place his thermos back on the desk – and the entire thing upended over the keyboard and his shirt.

“Oh, bloody hell.” Jemma would have sworn that they both muttered the same thing, improbable as that was, but Fitz was too busy lifting up the keyboard as she reached for their hard drive to notice. 

In the commotion, her hand brushed against his bare forearm, and she gasped as something sparked at the place their skin touched, not quite a static charge, and sent tingles of warmth all the way down through her toes. They watched as matching thin, tan bands faded into existence on both their wrists, and an unnatural feeling of peace washed over both of them. The calm only lasted for a few moments though, until Jemma met Fitz’s eyes and realized that she was not just staring back at her taciturn, competitive lab partner – she was staring back at her soulmate.

Jemma had never put much stock in soulmate marks. They were a constant feature of films and television shows, and from the farthest back she could remember people had talked about them as if finding one’s soulmate should be a person’s life goal. This had always seemed rather shallow and shortsighted to her, even when she was quite young, because she had so many questions about the world in which she lived that finding a soulmate seemed like far too much of a distraction. One thing was common in pop culture’s obsession with soulmate marks, though, and that was that people almost never found their soulmates before they were in their twenties (the teen soap operas her roommate loved frequently featured lovesick teenagers insisting that their respective other _had_ to be their soulmate, even if they didn’t have the mark), and sometimes people never found them at all. She had found great comfort in this, assuming that she wouldn’t have to deal with making room in her life for another person for quite some time yet, if ever. The thin, permanent band that now stood out on her wrist against her naturally pale skin clearly contradicted that assumption. 

The first coherent thought that Jemma had, other than a blank sort of shock, was that this wasn’t part of her plan. She had at least one more PhD to earn, had to graduate first in her class at the Academy, had to figure out her place in the world and answer as many questions about it as possible through her work – she didn’t know how to work a _soulmate_ into that equation. Life had thrown her a variable in the field, and she had no idea how to adapt. 

Then she abruptly remembered that there was a person standing in front of her with a matching mark, and snapped her gaze back up to meet Fitz’s eyes. Somehow, she’d never before noticed the striking blue pigmentation of his irises, and now those eyes were staring back at her with something akin to abject terror. Again, her thoughts shifted, and she focused in on the identity of the person that the universe had decided was her perfect partner, and frowned. 

“But you hate me.”

Fitz stared at her, slack jawed. “What?” 

“You hate me,” Jemma repeated, placing the harddrive down on a dry part of the table. “I can’t be your soulmate - this doesn’t make any sense.”

He blinked at her as if she’d just spoken in Swedish, and then put down the keyboard so he could wipe his hands on his jeans. “I don’t...” Fitz didn’t meet her eyes as he cleared his throat, and she wrinkled her nose in confusion at the sight of the stark blush working its way into his cheeks. “I don’t hate you.” 

“Yes, you do,” she replied, insistent. “You never talk to me. You barely _look_ at me.”

His shoulders hunched in further as she spoke, and he started rubbing one thumb into the palm of the other hand, still not meeting her gaze. This behavior completely befuddled Jemma because it was nothing like the standoffish, overconfident fellow genius with whom she’d become familiar at a distance for the past semester. It was almost as if he was _shy_ , and that didn’t make sense to her whatsoever. Geniuses had no reason to be shy. 

“I don’t – ah...” Fitz’s voice quieted even further, almost as if he was trying to fade away into the ground altogether, and his Scottish accent thickened as he spoke. “I didn’t talk ‘cause I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. You’re the smartest person here, and... I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. Sorta like I do right now,” he ended lamely, trying to smile at the self-deprecating joke but faltering as he finally met her gaze.

“Oh,” she answered simply, rapidly processing the fact that it seemed she’d completely miscalculated their entire relationship. This would take some mental reconfiguring. “Well, I already knew you were brilliant, that part’s hard to miss with you almost beating my marks in half our classes.” 

If it was possible, he flushed an even deeper pink, nervously pushing stray curls off his forehead. “Oh.” 

They stared at each other in silence again, both completely at a loss for how to proceed. A strange quirk of biology had just told them that they were born to spend the rest of their lives together, and how are two awkward, genius sixteen-year-olds supposed to handle that information?

Jemma tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear and exhaled. “I can’t say this was how I expected chemistry lab to go.” 

The comment startled a genuine laugh out of Fitz, and she smiled, surprised by how vastly mirth altered his face, lighting up the eyes that she now realized were often downcast not out of a sense of superiority, but out of shyness. But she couldn’t work out _why_ – he was obviously exceedingly intelligent, and he had nothing to be ashamed of in terms of his appearance, either. He’d grow into his somewhat gangly limbs, and his face really was quite symmetrical. And, she admitted very briefly, those eyes of which she’d only now taken notice really were quite striking.

“Yeah, me neither.” 

She glanced over at the computer. “We’ve got work to do, still, but when we’re done, do you... I don’t know, want to get coffee, maybe?”

Turning his own gaze back to the computer, Fitz swallowed and gave her a small nod, lips still turned up at the corners. “Yeah. That sounds good.”

They finished the rest of that afternoon’s work expeditiously, their normal efficiency feeling somehow both more relaxed and yet tenser. For Jemma’s part, she was getting used to not thinking that he detested her while also trying to figure out if she should relax because she _knew_ he was her soulmate – or if she should be more careful, because she didn’t want to do something to make him _start_ hating her, soulmate or not.

Finally, though, they’d cleaned up their workstation, gathered their belongings, and started the short walk to the nearby campus coffee shop, and Jemma tried desperately to think of what to say to Fitz once they were seated. It wasn’t that she was completely ignorant of normal social interaction – she’d even been told a few times that she was very likeable, and she knew that people often reacted positively when she smiled. But this was completely different from talking to other people. The mark encircling her wrist told her that Fitz was her soulmate, so in theory it should be easy for them to speak, but... what did one say to one’s soulmate? In the lab, they talked about science, and chemistry, and miserable old Professor Vaughn, but now they had to find other things to talk about and Jemma was alarmed to find that all she could think was this faint sort of white noise. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Fitz watching her as they approached the coffee shop entrance, studying her expression like she’d seen him examining the little robotic device not too long ago. On the one hand, the steadiness of those clear, blue eyes was a little unnerving, but on the other – they sort of made Jemma’s pulse speed up slightly, and she wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Realizing that she’d been staring back, she gave him one of her “likeable” smiles and he grinned back, reaching out to hold the door for her. _There_ , she thought to herself as she stepped into line. _That wasn’t so hard, was it_?

“Y’know, I actually hate coffee,” Fitz mused from behind her while he stared up at the menu.

Jemma turned around, clutching a textbook that was too large for her satchel to her chest. “Me, too. I’m a tea drinker, really, I don’t know why I suggested coffee...” 

“Me too!” The way his face lit up at that small connection eased her nerves further. “Well, not ‘why you suggested coffee’ – although I guess I dunno that either.”

They both laughed, then, and Jemma had the sudden realization that this may be the first time someone at the Academy had made her laugh about something that wasn’t science related. Admittedly, tea wasn’t the most enlightening of topics, but – it was a start.

A few minutes later, they were both seated at a wrought-iron table on the patio, holding their respective teas and lapsing again into vaguely uncomfortable silence. This time, though, Jemma studied Fitz unashamedly, watching him pull his chair closer to hers than she would have expected for someone so verbally reticent. She was amused by the way that his curls fell forward onto his brow, clearly the too-long hair of a teenager who was away from home for the first time and hadn’t bothered to get a haircut in months. Once he settled, he sort of tried to study her back, but seemed to find her gaze off-putting and dropped his eyes to stare at his hands, absently pushing aside his large, gold watch and tracing the mark.

“May I see it?” Jemma nodded down at the arm with the soulmate mark, having made the split-second decision that if maybe she approached this relationship like a scientific experiment it would make her less nervous.

Fitz blinked at her and then held his arm out, letting the watch slide back so that the mark was clearly visible. Scooting up in her chair, Jemma pulled his arm forward to rest on her knee, so as to hold it as still as possible. Her hair fell forward as she leaned over his arm, but was too engrossed in her new subject to pay her own appearance any attention. Jemma traced one fingertip along the underside of Fitz’s wrist, turning it gently over to see if the band was smooth all the way around. His skin was surprisingly soft for a boy, and the movement of her finger caused goosebumps to shiver into existence all over his forearm.

“S-sorry,” he stuttered, shifting in his seat but not withdrawing his arm. “Tickles.”

“Good thing to know about one’s soulmate,” Jemma murmured in return, not paying attention to his reaction anymore. She lifted her own wrist next to his to observe how the marks matched up. They weren’t anything extraordinary, really – plain, tannish bands that suggested a far greater level of normalcy than their sudden appearance entailed. When the marks touched, both bands glowed faintly, as if the physical contact incited some sort of chemical reaction within the mark itself. It almost reminded her of the kind of bioluminescence found in certain marine life, but with a warmer hue. Jemma wondered if maybe he'd let her take a sample of a few skin cells to examine in her microscope. 

“So, what d’you think? Definitely soulmates, then?” Fitz gave her a hesitant smile, and she realized she’d probably been staring at his wrist for a few minutes too long and let go. But the warmth of his skin had felt nice on her cold hands, and an unbidden memory of something she’d seen on TV once about soulmates made her blush. 

“Yes, soulmates. Definitely that.” She gave her head a quick shake and exhaled. _If you were in a lab, you wouldn’t be nervous_ , she chided herself. Glancing back up at him, the words were out of her mouth before she’d truly consciously decided to ask. “Can I kiss you?”

The flush that had covered Fitz’s face earlier when she’d insisted that he hated her returned with a vengeance, and his mouth just gaped open in surprise until Jemma rambled on, trying to explain herself. “I was just thinking that we have something of a unique opportunity to explore the effects of having one’s soulmate mark appear at such a young age, and physicality is one of the first side-effects, which we already saw with the ‘mated calm’ effect that we both experienced right after – or, well, I know I experienced, I didn’t ask –” 

“Yeah, I felt it,” he interjected, somehow implausibly still following the disaster that was her explanation.

“Yes, right, good. So I thought that kissing would be a natural place to start, and that we can just remain friends, it doesn’t have to be anything else, because we’re far too young to enter into that kind of soulmate relationship, I think, but if we work together we could essentially conduct an experiment on ourselves concerning the effects of being marked at a young age.” A loud pounding made itself known in her head, and Jemma ground to a halt, half expecting him to be insulted and storm away. Somehow, she hadn’t planned to suggest they just remain friends – with kissing, potentially – but now that it was out there it seemed like rather a good idea. She barely understood him at all, it seemed, and, frankly, it would be nice to just have a friend here. Most people at the Academy barely interested her; except, now, for Fitz.

Instead of being angry or insulted, however, Fitz grinned. “Yeah,” he breathed, staring at her with a shy sort of wonderment. “Yeah, that’s a _great_ idea.” 

“Really?” She couldn’t help but let a sliver of eagerness work its way into her voice.

His blush returned for a moment. “I – I mean using ourselves as an experiment, not the kissing. Not that I don’t want the kissing. I don’t mind the kissing, that’s fine – I mean...” Fitz let out a small groan of annoyance and pinched the bridge of his nose between his two forefingers, and she couldn’t hold back the giggle that escaped.

For some reason, his evident nervousness made her own edge slightly away, and Jemma reached out and tugged him forward by the marked arm to bring him close enough that his knees bumped against the edge of her chair. Letting out a quick puff of air, Fitz moved as she bid, wide eyes watching and waiting for her to initiate the next move. Jemma took a moment to wrinkle her nose in indecision, not having had any prior experience with kissing to know how this was supposed to be done. After a moment too long, she leaned forward and pressed her lips flat against his. 

It seemed she was still nervous after all, because she’d approached a little too fast and knocked into him harder than she'd intended, causing Fitz’s hand to come up to her neck to steady her against him, resettling their lips against each other without pulling back. Jemma realized that she hadn’t thought to ask if he’d ever been kissed before either, but somehow she doubted it. With that thought she allowed herself to learn how to kiss along with Fitz – the lab partner she’d thought hated her until maybe an hour and a half ago. 

At first, Jemma thought there wasn’t much to this kissing lark, both of them just sort of holding there, waiting for things to happen. Then she tried moving her lips gently against his, and Fitz mimicked her, and... that was entirely different. Something about the friction, or his warmth, or the sweetness left over from his last sip of tea, changed Jemma’s mind entirely about the appeal of kissing. His mouth was soft and searching against hers, learning about her just as she was about him, and she realized that at some point she’d curled her fingers into his collar to tug him closer. Fitz parted his lips slightly, just barely brushing her bottom lip with his tongue, and an odd, yearning sort of gasp escaped from Jemma’s throat, causing her to pull back at last and try to catch her breath. 

The look Fitz gave her when she opened her eyes was torn between dazedness and worry, presumably concerned that he’d frightened her off by his last experiment. He hadn’t, of course, but Jemma needed a few moments to gather her thoughts first. That had been almost too good, that last kiss, and she was suddenly very glad that she’d already suggested they remain friends. What with already having their soulmate marks, something told her that they could very easily rush into all kinds of things that incredibly intelligent students such as themselves should not. But that also didn’t mean that she was completely above wanting to continue their experimentation. 

“That was a very good data point,” she breathed at last, smoothing down her hair where he’d disarranged it.

Fitz tilted his head to the side, appearing puzzled for a moment as he worked through her meaning in his head. “Data point... as in, to be part of a...”

“Data set, yes. No experiment is complete without replication.” Jemma took a sip of her cooling tea and watched as a smile bloomed on his face again before he shook his head clear and nodded.

“Right, yeah. The experiment. Soulmate friends with occasional kissing. Data set 1.” They both giggled and he sat back, seeming nervous but also more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. “Y’know, Simmons, I –”

“You can call me Jemma,” she offered, tracing the edge of her paper cup. “If we’re... I mean, if we’re soulmates, it seems silly to stick to last names, don’t you think?” 

“Jem-ma,” Fitz sounded out, and then wrinkled his nose. “Feels odd.”

She ducked her head, grinning despite herself. “You don’t have to –”

“Maybe once we know each other better,” he said, speaking over her. “But I like Simmons. Suits you.” 

Jemma watched the tips of his ears flush again, although why saying that he liked her surname would embarrass him was completely beyond her. “Cheers,” she answered, raising her cup in a mock toast. “Shall I stay away from Leopold or Leo, then?”

He made a sharp noise of disgust and shook his head vehemently. “Yeah, please. I really bloody hate my name, to be honest. It’s so old fashioned.”

“I rather like Leo,” she said, shrugging. “It sounds dignified. But I’ll keep to Fitz.” Jemma nudged his arm and grinned again, suddenly aware that she’d smiled more times today than she had in her first month at the Academy altogether. Not politely smiled, or smiled to disguise annoyance, but truly, genuinely smiled. “Seems to suit you, too.”

“Cheers,” he teased, mimicking her, before taking a long sip of his tea and lapsing into what was actually a comfortable sort of silence. 

Glancing down at the mark encircling her wrist, Jemma still thought that the whole concept of a biological connection to one’s soulmate was more than a little ludicrous. But this stupid line had actually taught her that the only interesting person on campus didn’t hate her after all, and it would most likely result in her having her first friend in the United States, and that did seem rather promising.

 

\------

 

_Three Years Later_

 

For some reason, Thursdays were always the worst day of the week for Jemma, and today had been no exception. First, she had been on an ultimately unsurprisingly dull date, and now Fitz was acting as if he was angry with her. She didn’t know what she could possibly have done to him now – he’d been prickly around her for days – but she wanted to vent to someone about the date and he was her best candidate. Well, only candidate. It was either him or her roommate’s illegal pet bunny, and even poor, fluffy Priscilla wasn’t going to provide the kind of therapy Jemma needed tonight.

All of this led back to a night at the Boiler Room a few weeks ago, when Jemma had overheard some older girls talking about how glad they were not to have found their soulmates yet, that having one so young would just weigh them down. That they wanted to be able to find themselves before locating their other halves. At first, Jemma was insulted – why couldn’t someone find themself along _with_ their other half? But the thought had niggled at her for days, until finally she proposed another experiment to Fitz: That they each try to find someone they might be interested in dating.

Their relationship had been ambiguous, to say the least, for the past three years – occasional kissing, regular cuddling, and extraordinary friendship, without anything close to a clear statement of interest in “more” from either party. So it made sense to Jemma that they explore other options with each other’s permission, just to see how that affected this whole “soulmate” business with which their society was so intensely focused. After all, she’d reasoned, where else would they be this likely to find someone with an acceptable mental acuity other than an Academy populated with other geniuses? No one else was as intelligent as either of them, surely, but the odds were more in their favor here than anywhere else.

Although she hadn’t been able to help but notice the surprise that flared behind Fitz’s oh-so-blue eyes, he’d just shrugged and agreed. He had yet to share with her anything about his dates – which she assumed he must be going on, not only because he’d promised he would, but also because he hadn’t always answered her knocks at his door since starting the experiment. Whatever his experiences were, though, each one of hers was simply worse than the last. One of them had even had a genuinely symmetrical face and acceptably low body fat percentage, but he’d barely managed to understand her proposed mid-term thesis – and what was the point of being in a relationship if she couldn’t share her work with her boyfriend?

Tonight’s date had been no better, and she’d gone to her best friend’s Sci-Ops-adjacent flat looking for some comfort – and perhaps an assurance that needing her romantic partner to be at least _almost_ as smart as she was didn’t make her a bad person. But Fitz had just turned on his heel and strode back into the flat without so much as a hello. When she followed him inside, kicking off her kitten heels and dumping her purse on its usual table, she found him leaning on a window ledge and staring pensively out at the night-blanketed campus. 

Approaching him warily, Jemma fiddled with the thick, silk bracelet she’d put on earlier to hide the soulmate mark. Fitz’s mark was often obscured by the watch that slid about on his slender wrist anyway, so intentionally hiding hers for the dates didn’t seem quite so bad. (The first date had spent a long time being deeply confused about her decision to accept his offer for dinner if she’d already discovered her soulmate, so she’d decided that avoiding the question was easier than trying to come up with an answer.)

“What’s wrong?” 

Fitz shook his head, keeping his gaze averted; she could just barely see the reflection of his eyes in the window. “Doesn’t matter. You wanted to complain about your date, yeah? Go ahead.”

She exhaled, frustrated with his penchant for reticence. As they’d gotten to know each other in the months after becoming friends during chemistry lab, he’d eventually gotten better about sharing things with her, but she still got the sense that he often kept something back. Most days, she let him have his secrets, but Jemma wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Fitz, clearly something’s bothering you, and has been for days. Just tell me what it is –”

“You,” he bit out, voice tense as it broke over her words. “Alright? You, and your bloody dates.”

Stunned by his sudden anger, Jemma crossed her arms. “You agreed that it would be a good idea to establish whether –”

“Yeah, course I agreed – ‘cause you suggested it. Couldn’t ever let you down, how could I?” Fitz let out a noise of frustration as he straightened, carding his fingers roughly through his curls. “I don’t want to do this anymore, Jemma. I just don’t.” 

Jemma softened and took a couple steps forward, wondering if maybe some bad dates were wearing on him, too. “But we’re scientists, Fitz. It makes sense for us to approach –”

“I don’t care what makes bloody sense, Jemma, I’m –” Fitz groaned again, turned away, turned back, then balled up his fists and squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t care if it makes sense to test the boundaries of the ruddy soulmate bond because I – oh, lord, why is this so hard to say?” He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and let out the rest of his words in a rush that anyone who didn’t know intricacies of Fitz’s Scottish inflection (like Jemma did) would almost certainly have missed.

“I don't care because I’m in love with you. Completely and utterly and I don’t know when it happened, but it’s true and I am. Pretty sure I would be even if we hadn’t been told that we were born for each other when we were bloody sixteen years old.” A whoosh of air rushed out of her lungs as he met her gaze, and Jemma realized that she’d stopped breathing. His face was flushed, fingers digging so firmly into his palms that his knuckles were white. For a second, she thought he was going to stop, as if looking up at her had halted him in his tracks – but he exhaled and kept going, a tinge of desperation working its way out behind his accent. 

“I just don’t see why it’s bad that we found our soulmates when were so young, I don’t. Aren’t we lucky, really? I can’t imagine working with anyone else half as well as with you, and I don’t think anyone else is nearly as gorgeous, and honestly I look forward to seeing you more than I do my robotics some days, and – oh, God, please, stop me from talking, why aren’t you stopping me? You interrupt everyone –”

Before Jemma knew what she was doing, she’d flung her arms around his neck and stopped his rambling by pressing her lips firmly to his. She didn’t even know why she did it other than the fact that his confession had sent a huge rush of adrenaline through her entire body and this strange, tingly warmth had bloomed in her chest, and the only thing she could think to do in that moment was show him because she had no idea what to say. As she slid her lips against his, melting closer to his body as he responded and his hands twisted into the back of her shirt, Jemma’s mind raced, trying to make her brain catch up with her instincts, to understand what this meant.

Fitz said he loved her – and although she’d never been in love before, or ever had anyone truly describe it to her without absolutes or platitudes, she deduced that this must be what it felt like. Because she already knew that he was her favorite person in the whole world – even more than her parents, although she did love them in their own way – and maybe all this waiting had done was to prove that she wasn’t imagining the way she sometimes got butterflies when he looked her way or sat a little too closely to her on the sofa, even though he’d done both hundreds of times. Maybe there weren’t really any experiments or studies that could determine her feelings once and for all. Maybe her love for Fitz just _was_ , without quantification or conclusions. Maybe she really had found her soulmate at sixteen, and maybe the stupid line around her wrist wasn’t actually so stupid after all.

All too soon, Fitz pulled back, panting slightly against her lips as he leaned his forehead against hers, his pupils dilated and shining with a hesitant sort of hope that made Jemma’s stomach do a funny little flip. “I’m not gonna complain about the kissing, but... what does –” 

“I’ve never been in love before, and everyone says it’s not something you can really describe, so maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’ve just been very slow, but I think I’m in love with you, Fitz.” Jemma said it all in a rush before she could overthink it again, nervous that he’d chide her or doubt her or change his mind. Because although he was Fitz, her Fitz, her funny, grouchy engineering genius, she’d never done this before and suddenly she felt rather small and adrift. 

But she needn’t have worried, because the moment he processed her words a slow smile made its way across his face, and he puffed out a surprised “Oh.” Then he was kissing her again, snugging her tightly against his chest – still bony but slightly fuller than when they’d first met, her hands readily roaming over the still-developing musculature of his shoulders as she caught her balance. They’d kissed so many times now, to experiment or for practice or because they were bored, that Jemma didn’t understand how it could feel so different now, how tongues and feelings and _knowing_ made it seem so acutely intimate. 

After a few moments, Fitz pushed against her, walking her clumsily backwards until her shoulders hit the wall, his hand already at the back of her head to cushion an accidental blow. Jemma gasped at the impact but he just absorbed the sound with his kisses, using the wall to support himself as he continued to explore the best ways to make her shiver under his touch.

She wondered if he’d thought about this before, if he’d imagined how it would feel to hold her like this or slide his tongue over hers with the intention of building this heat between them. Wondered if he’d pressed the length of his body against her knowing it would make her mind feel all fuzzy and her skin hypersensitive. Wanted to know if this felt nearly as incredible and addictive to him as it did to her.

The idea of pulling away to ask flitted through her head, but she rejected it in favor of curling her fingers into his hair and gliding her tongue lightly over his bottom lip, grinning at the involuntary whimper this caused in the back of his throat. Because Fitz was Jemma’s soulmate and he loved her, because they had all the time in the world to figure out what they’d become together, and because she still had so very many questions.

**Author's Note:**

> I might end up revisiting this world in one way or another down the line - I'm kind of in love with this version of our duo. :-)


End file.
